Le Président Hollande and the Cinema

The last time a Socialist took over as President of France, in 1981, vast changes resulted for the French film industry. That incoming leader was François Mitterrand, and he brought in a Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, who made things happen. First, there was the money: under Mitterrand and Lang, government investment in movies increased seven hundred and fifty per cent. Then there was the sense of cultural urgency and priority: in September of that year, Lang made a statement by not attending the Deauville Film Festival, a showcase for American movies. Lang, backed by the new President, sought to assert what in France is now familiarly called the “cultural exception”—originally, the exception of cultural products from free-trade agreements but, in practice, the keeping, preserving, and advancing French culture under the protection of the state.

And with Mitterrand and Lang came the filmmakers whose audacious and liberating works played a catalytic role in the events of May, 1968 (and who had been demonized and marginalized for it by the right-wing governments of the seventies)—those of the French New Wave. In a movement dramatized here in “The Big Chill,” France’s radicals of the late sixties had become mainstream moderate-left politicians and writers allied with Mitterrand, and when he came to office, they brought their artistic heroes to the forefront of French culture. The eighties were the decade in which Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut (who died in 1984 and hardly had a chance to benefit), Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and even the openly rightist Eric Rohmer—as well as other filmmakers in their orbit, such as Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, and younger acolytes such as Philippe Garrel and Chantal Akerman—ascended to primacy as models of artistic achievement and significance. Yet, paradoxically, the confirmation of the movies as an officially enshrined art form, and of these artistically supreme and ambitious filmmakers as its avatars, coincided with the general ascension of their works to the rarefied audiences of high art. Which is to say that, on the basis of commerce alone, their movies had become bad bets, and their production was kept afloat by subsidy.

The audiences for such movies had become similar to those for opera or classical music, and the Mitterrand/Lang administration went further to realize the analogy: the leading French film school changed its name and its orientation, and became a place where the New Wave (several of whose luminaries had been rejected from the school in the past) would be principal mentors (for instance, Godard was recruited to install an office and studio there; the project didn’t come to fruition, but he did maintain informal relations with the school).

Subsidy for movies of artistic ambition has become the norm in France now, one that even the right-wing government of Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t alter significantly. One of the notable stories regarding “The Artist” is that it was produced with private funds when the cultural authorities spurned it; I wrote about it here, along with a discussion of some movies that did receive subsidy. But it’s worth recalling that the New Wave filmmakers, in their youth, were punks—they were outsiders who crashed the gates of an industry that they had gone out of their way to deride as critics; they scrounged their funding, at first, from producers who were themselves at the industry’s margins (or, in Chabrol’s case, from a family inheritance). The system, as currently constituted, favors veteran filmmakers whose names are long made (though I was shocked to hear, over coffee in Paris a decade ago with a couple of industry insiders, that Rohmer had been denied an advance on receipts for a film) and younger filmmakers who are able to waft cultural charm.

The younger filmmakers of France are largely conservatory students; they’ve learned to play the system of cultural politics, and they haven’t recharged the industry as American independent filmmakers, working on a shoestring and without the benefit of subsidies, have done. The paradoxes are rampant: on one hand, the ongoing sustenance of a popular film industry is something of a precondition for the emergence of serious directors, who need cast and crew, distributors and theatres, materiel and its suppliers—and when an industry collapses, it’s hard for filmmakers to reëstablish it by the sheer force of their vision. Yet, at the same time, today’s independent filmmakers, working on ultra-low budgets, have, for the most part, done almost entirely without the support of the industry (although some of their eminences, such as Greta Gerwig and the Duplass brothers, have found their way in). It remains to be seen whether American independents can, by and large, make a living by way of their films—and whether young French dependents can break with venerated living tradition as the advancement of the art requires.

In any case, it doesn’t seem likely that François Hollande will effect changes as drastic as those that Mitterrand inspired; the French left has become, culturally as well as politically, conservative, in the literal sense of the term.